MR | First Edition, October 2013

This month’s Sessions was probably the most interesting I’ve participated in, so kudos to Derek at It’s Not Just the Alcohol Talking. Certainly, a lot of the points I brought up were echoed in various ways by other bloggers, suggesting an overall tone, as Draft Magazine put it, of “cautious optimism“. The most bearish but best articulated case – with some simple calculations – was put forward by Ramblings of a Beer Runner.

The queue in the real ale tent was never less than six deep, from midday to midnight. Men and women from eighteen to sixty stood around discussing the list, asking each other for tips. It took at least twenty minutes to get served. The ciders and perrys started running out on the Thursday night, before the festival had even begun properly. By Saturday everything had gone, and they were sending vans around Wales to grab whatever beer and cider they could to fill the empty stillages.

I really feel like I’m tilting at windmills, although the prohibitionists seem like the bat-shit crazy Don Quixote who sees dragons and damsels in distress everywhere he looks. They keep making the same arguments, ones that are riddled with holes, seemingly oblivious — though more likely maliciously deceitful — to how most people actually enjoy their alcohol or how the overwhelming majority of breweries are small family-owned businesses with deep roots in their local communities.

The Treasury department (which the TTB is part of) has listed what departments it’s going to be shutting down or reducing to save money so other, more crucial, parts can keep running. The TTB isn’t being totally shutdown as it collect taxes, god forbid they stop collecting taxes even if we get nothing in return for them. However, all label, formula, and new brewery approval is ceasing.

2. Top Beer: three obnoxious blokes with longish hair sit around making laddish jokes. They go to Oktoberfest and leer at waitresses. They take baths in beer, snort it, inject it, take it in suppository form, and fire it out of cannons. They attempt to operate heavy machinery while under the influence of alcohol and get loads of complaints. Music: Status Quo.

Please, if you’re reading this, please send help. Something… something has gone terribly wrong. We tried to make something so hoppy it was hoppier than even a pile of hops. But we made something terrible. Something that’s more monster than hops. We never meant for it to end like this. Blood. Blood and hops, everywhere. May God have mercy on us all.

Renowned beer-lover Barack Obama won’t have far to walk for a tipple at next year’s G20 summit, with a new microbrewery set to open at the summit’s venue.

The new microbrewery will open at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, opposite the ABC building on Grey Street, South Bank, some time after Christmas.

The G20 thirst quencher is revealed within South Bank Corporation’s 2012-13 annual report.

Or you could have read about it on this blog, which suggested a JS brewpub was coming to South Bank months ago (and then confirmed it in August). Nice try, mainstream media, but you’ve been beaten by an amateur with an internet connection once again.